Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 15-21 September, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Google shows the Googlebook computers coming in a few weeks
• Mr. Trump renames AI "Super Intelligence"
• Meta has a big event, shows new glasses
• A judge fines Apple $5.7Billion
• Mr. Xi visits Washington

Monday 15 September 2026

Mr. Xi comes to Washington. Everyone is talking AI and ignoring the collapse of the rest of China's economy.

People are building and selling humanoid robots. Many, however, are experiments and not useful.

Slight of hand, a.k.a., accounting may be propping up much of high tech's sales.

Meanwhile in South Korea, the governors are allowing young people to fulfill their service duty by working in research labs.

Anthropic and the current President. A collision of personalities. News flash (not): Mr. Amodei will still be at Anthropic after Mr. Trump's term ends.

Our Dept of War is buying 60,000 drones this year. No parts from China.

Meanwhile in China, the latest tools are allowing the creation of one-person companies. Boom. Some boost to the economy. And behind it all are datacenters. Industrial capacity.

But on the other hand, those one-person companies aren't providing jobs for the masses.

Wired runs a special issue on women in technology.

And now we have Grandma slop. Sigh.

Researchers at Stanford conclude that the brain is two organs, not one.

Beware of job recruiters that give applicants assignments. BEWARE! Amazon is notorious for this.

Yet another piece where someone claims that if you publish more than X words a day, you are using AI because no one can write X words a day. Foolishness. I once wrote a 3,000-word short story in 90 minutes. That was long before AI was present. Come on folks.

Some notes about Smashwords (lots of my short stories there), Draft2Digital (absorbed Smashwords), and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. This can all be confusing.

Tuesday 16 September 2026

Promoting the arts, Apple shows the Apple Music Hall at their building in London.

It appears that all those smart people running universities have yet to be smart when it comes to learning and the new tools. Must be tough (not).

Meanwhile in Richardson, Texas, Amazon et al. are dropping packgage from the sky. Residents aren't happy with the results.

Layoffs at Xbox.

Meanwhile in California where the regulators gotta' regulate, they must have enough jobs already and industry that pays taxes, too.

It seems that next to the writing industry, the mathematics industry is in a rumble about what these new tools can do.

Here is a new one in a side note: one of our tech celebrities is going to speak at the United Nations. Is there anything that boosts the ego more than that?

The stock value of the CPU-making companies rises.

Crank it up to 11 with a M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB of RAM. This is a special machine Apple supplied to the writer for testing. No price given. Let's say $10,000. Whoa! That's a lot of apples. I am so old that I remember paying $6million for super computers. $10,000 isn't that much for a business that wants to search its records and must have complete privacy. Sure, such organizations can hire programmers to write SQL et al. for such digging of information. Uh, how far does $10,000 go in programmer salaries? Oh, the machine pays for itself in a month.

A similar review of Apple's state-of-the-practice Mac Mini.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious. Such is rare these days.

Here come the Googlebook computers. They are supposed to offer the type of integration that iPhones and Mac computers have. Google has all the big PC makers on the team.

The hacker house becomes the AI house and well, boys will be boys. Enough kidding and giggling: real access to real power brings real abuse. Not good at all. Disgusting.

Wednesday 17 September 2026

The enrollment in computer science programs has dropped. Good. When my grandson and his buddies graduate from CS in five years, there will be a shortage with demand.

A little more information on the Googlebook computers.

The KDE free software community turns 30 years old.

Anthropic claims to have saved the overseas Tibetan community from the Communist Party of China.

Speaking of the Communist Party of China, their campaign to turn Americans against industrial capacity is working quite well.

The market for various types of smart glasses is booming.

Success leads to failure as Xbox goes for a billion customers while laying off its employees.

I don't understand this. A company will use the cloud to read all your local files or something.

Qualcomm shows two new Snapdragon chipsets for mobile devices. They use a 2 nm process.

OpenAI releases new capabilities. We are now up to GPT-6.

And Anthropic now has Claude Opus 5.5.

Meta claims 500,000 users of its new Muse software.

Artificial Intelligence is out. Super Intelligence is in.

Thursday 18 September 2026

Whether wisdom or hyperbole, AI is the new currency. I lean towards hyperbole.

Another report from another AI company that earlier projections of income were under estimated. The acceleration of income is amazing.

Anthropic claims its users are seeing answers much faster. My experience doesn't agree with the report. Perhaps I don't have the proper type of account.

Meanwhile in China, hardware is the new software. Hardware companies are booming $$$.

Meanwhile in India, the food regulators are hitting everyone with more inspections and fines.

An independent report, deep reading, on AI agents attempting to hack into public sites.

Not having much else to do with their time, some of our US Senators hold a hearing on license plate readers. It's a tool. Law enforcement can use the tool for much good. Some law enforcement persons have no ethics and are no more than the proverbial bullies with badges. That is a great shame.

Meta held a big event with many announcements on hardware, especially smart glasses. Here is one summary.

Quoting the headline: Microsoft unveils the $1,149+ Surface Pro 12-inch and the $1,199+ Surface Laptop 13-inch with Snapdragon X2 Plus.

Microsoft to pour $10billion (with a B) into the Middle East. Interesting reaction to the US-Iran conflict in which the Iranians destroyed several big Amazon investments.

I do not like this news. More top AI researchers are moving to China than the US. Waiting to see if these researchers thrive under the Communist Party system.

Corporate cultural identity returns to America. At one time, to be an IBM family meant much more than a couple of words.

Friday 19 September 2026

OpenAI hired people to train AI. The people used AI instead.

More rich people try to create alternatives to the education system we've been using for a few hundred years. Perhaps times have changed. Perhaps not.

My wife and I were discussing this at dinner last night before I saw this story. It amazes me that Flock is being crushed and their employees are losing their jobs. The folks at Flock did nothing wrong. State and local governments hired Flock. State and local governments installed and ran the systems at tax-payer expense. Flock did not hold a gun to the heads of these public officials. Flock, however, is suffering for everything that everyone else did.

Our current President brushes off peer pressure at the UN and pushes forward for more advances in AI. It is technology. It is industrial capacity.

Meanwhile in China, the official line is, "Slow down AI." The reality is quite different as local governments push for jobs and ... yes, industrial capacity.

Ah, the air gap. Of course it works. The AI companies should use it. Everyone else should use it, too. If you connect your factory or your Flock database or your water and sewage system to the Internet, someone will hack it and steal it. Air gap.

Anthropic tosses $11.6billion (with a B) to Akamai cloud services.

Mr. Xi visits Washington.

I guess someone needed to have an avatar that lip syncs and all that stuff.

Quoting: The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it is spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds this year evaluating and testing advanced artificial intelligence models. That doesn't seem true. The NSA doesn't have that kind of money to spend on anything.

It appears there are people working at the White House who simply cannot stop fussing with Mr. Amodei.

Google is about to test the viability of orbital dataceneters.

For once, we are back to talking in million$. Amazon to spend a hundred of them on a factory in Indiana that will build the robots Amazon uses in its warehouses.

Industry leaders propose the Standards Authority for Frontier AI or SAFA.

The contact-less polygraph makes a comeback. This is actually quite simple and uses basic pattern analysis techniques. $30million, or whatever is being requested, is far to much for this. Old techniques, old technology, inflated price.

Saturday 20 September 2026

Is the era of the Large Language Model ending? I hope so. We can certainly do more with less.

The Russians are hitting datacenters in Ukraine. These are factories. These are industrial capacity. Disperse.

Researchers claim OpenAI system tried to break into our central government. OpenAI officials claim no knowledge of the incidents. I claim everyone is telling the truth. There is a great lack of competency at OpenAI et al.

Governors in Alabama learn how to extract a cool couple hundred million $$$ from TikTok.

Someone has a grasp of the obvious. You build something that hurts people, you are responsible. The degree of responsibility, however, is open to argument.

And here we have the opposite: agents acted in undesirable ways. Bologna. Someone wrote defect-laden software and turned it loose. Someone is responsible for these problems.

Microsoft drops the Copilot+ sticker on computers. The entire AI PC etc. marketing attempt flopped.

Quoting the headline: A federal appeals court upholds DOD's Anthropic blacklisting

Jensen Huang shares his thoughts on AI and the stuff taking over the world and such nonsense.

Meanwhile in New Mexico, the scare-dy-cats are winning the battle against the evil datacenters.

Sunday 21 September 2026

Effective altruism, Anthropic, and AI safety with a little doomsday prepping tossed in.

Researchers at the top AI companies are studying security incidents by the tens of thousands. They are trying to find the secret sauce or the difference that makes a difference.

How to hack into a computer system: use the brute force and ignorance method. Turn a datacenter worth of computers at a problem and trying tens of thousands of things. All this superintelligence isn't. It is just "try, try again."

Who is afraid of AI or anything else? Those who seek to limit it.

Quoting the headline: The US and China create a Super Intelligence Dialogue on AI risks and a separate AI incident hotline, likened to a Cold War-era .red telephone.

Some folks call it personalized pricing, discriminatory pricing, or other things. Let's say a store charged poorer customers lower prices than richer customers. Is that a bad thing? Does Mom and Pop groceries have the right and ability to do so? Is that a bad thing? Business frequently gives benefits to rich and frequent customers. Is that a bad thing? All of a sudden, something we have been doing for a long time is a bad thing.

A judge hits Apple with a $5.7Billion (with a B) fine over patent infringement. That is a large number. The award, no doubt, will be appealed.

Somehow the digital natives, a.k.a., Gen Z, never learned how to type. Huh?

The value of Raspberry Pi stock jumps up 30%.

Meanwhile at Canonical, (quoting) We are getting much better at finding and cataloging problems that may have previously gone unnoticed.

After 40 years of only one item per cell, we can now put a list of items in a cell in Excel. I have never been an expert at Excel. I gather that this is some sort of great leap forward.